Scott Carney

Books

The Red Market, A Death on Diamond Mountain, and What Doesn’t Kill Us are an investigative journalism trilogy that aims to understand how the body mind and spirit come together. In The Red Market, I explored the illegal markets for human body parts that come about when powerful economies come to see the human body as a commodity. In A Death on Diamond Mountain, I try to make sense of how one man’s quest to become enlightened ended in his tragic and misguided death. Finally, in What Doesn’t Kill Us, I learn how training the body in increasingly uncomfortable conditions and hostile environments can tap into evolutionary strength.

What Doesn’t Kill Us

What Doesn’t Kill Us traces our evolutionary journey back to a time when survival depended on how well we adapted to the environment around us. Our ancestors crossed the Alps in animal skins and colonized the New World in loin cloths, seemingly impervious to the elements. Modern humans have lost their biological link to the environment…

The Enlightenment Trap

In 2012, thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson’s search for spiritual transcendence ended in tragedy on a remote Arizona mountaintop. His wife, a woman anointed as a goddess by an eccentric Buddhist community, held him in her arms as he slowly died from dehydration and dysentery. For Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, Thorson’s death was just the most recent iteration of an unspoken epidemic that connected intensive meditation and mental instability…

The Red Market

An in-depth report that takes readers on a shocking tour through a macabre global underworld where organs, bones, and live people are bought and sold on the red market

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has spent five years on the ground tracing the lucrative and deeply secretive trade in human bodies and body parts—a vast hidden economy known as the “red market.” From the horrifying to the ridiculous, he discovers its varied forms…